Mosley Went to Mow Read online

  Some of the younger students at the Field Studies Centre had never before been out in the true darkness of night. All their lives they had been used to some degree of street-lighting, or at least to the glimmer of a curtained window illuminating concrete. The organizers of the courses therefore had no difficulty in putting together interesting night exercises for them. Almost everything excited them – at least for the first ten minutes – and almost everything was an event. Even as mundane a necessity as a boy urinating against a tree in the middle distance could be turned into an object lesson on the way noise travels at night.

  The scholars from St Mary’s Church of England Primary School at Hepton Ford might be said to be enjoying their field course vicariously. They had been led to look at lichens and water beetles, they had filled their pockets with pine cones and vacated snail shells, they had looked at owl pellets through hand-lenses. But for most of them this was a first experience of living together away from home. The eight- and nine-year-olds talked incessant sex, found corners for clandestine smoking, and there was one little knot of girls for whom life held no greater joy than to slip a quarter of a mile behind the rest of the party and sing pop choruses in the shelter of a gritstone shooting-butt.

  The older party staying at the Centre were a group of survey students from Bradburn Tech, and for them night was rather a different matter. They passed the day going through the motions of triangulating arbitrary parcels of the bleak landscape, and were supposed to spend at least part of their evenings putting their calculations on record. But they were not strangers to darkness, nor to its potential. They were six or seven years older than the group from the school, a gap which made a vital difference in orientation. For whereas the children talked of very little else but the facts of life, the students had reached the stage of practical work in that area too. And for a number of them, this expedition was providing a first real opportunity. The evening – and for one or two who had got things organized, the whole night – offered unrivalled chances for research and the supplementation of human knowledge. It even made it seem worthwhile slogging the hills for five hours a day in pursuit of trigonometrical ratios.

  Nigel Teesdale and Sue Grayson, for example, were drifting by mutual expectation towards their first adult experience. They were both seventeen, and they both lived on the same tower-block estate on the developing perimeter of Bradburn. They had both been the sole reason why their parents had married, and each had at home a regular companion with whom they had so far shrunk from actual copulation.

  Previously known to each other only by sight, they had discovered each other on this week’s outing – as early, in fact, as the outward journey on the college minibus. After an hour or so of treating each other with a sort of comic contempt, they had thrown the sentiments of their native Bradburn to the winds and gone abundance on each other, under the impression that the manner of their courtship was highly original and exclusive to themselves. Sue tried a clumsily obvious middle course between playing hard to get and dropping unambiguous hints that she might not prove impossible. Nigel kept his eyes fixed on the main object of life by steering the conversation whenever he could on to such stimulating subjects as soft porn and the ethics of contraception. On the off chance, he had in fact equipped himself for field-work by buying half a dozen packets of an elementary device at his hairdresser’s.

  And tonight – the night of the Friday on which Janie Goodwin had disappeared – he was going to go the whole hog. Sue knew this – and though she had made no promises, she had not allowed him to stray more than a yard or two from her side throughout the day.

  The boudoir of their Eden had already been earmarked: an old plate-layer’s hut – a solid little building with a low-pitched roof, which stood by the former track of the Old Railway. There was something about old railways – Georgina Crane surged with awareness of it. They made her think of the journeys that had been so vital to those who had made them. She thought of red oil lamps flickering between the rear buffers of disappearing trains. She thought of family partings, the only memory of someone whisked away being a sprite of smoke hung earthbound under the coping-stones of silent bridges.

  Sue and Nigel had no such thoughts. Their single-minded conception of romance was enshrined in that plate-layer’s hut. The hut was in fact famous in the mythology of the Field Studies Centre. Tales about the role it had played in human relationships had been passed on from one visiting party to another for years.

  One difficulty tonight was that the party of Juniors was being officially conducted along the Old Railway as part of their nocturnal education. They had made loud, crude jokes at the sight of the hut, of which they had also heard. Some of them tried to get into it, only to find that its door had been fitted with a new hasp and padlock. It seemed an age before Nigel and Sue were able to get near the place. By then it was almost too late for them to avail themselves of its amenities. They had almost reached the culmination of biological existence lying behind one of the broken walls of the cutting whilst the Juniors were still in earshot. But Sue did not care much for the scratchy stalks of the creeping bilberry shrubs against the sensitive skin on the insides of her thighs. And Nigel underwent a temporary loss of virility when a picnic-tamed sheep tried to nuzzle his bare posterior.

  The schoolchildren eventually moved off to laugh, sing and urinate elsewhere. Sue and Nigel clambered down the embankment. Nigel removed the hasp and padlock, using the blade of his penknife as a screwdriver. He had a pocket torch with him, and shone it into the inside of the hut.

  Sue gave a little yelp at what they saw. There was a smell of resinous timber in the hut, and a sort of raised platform had been erected in the middle of it. Its purpose was all too clear: a rope was hanging from a cross-beam, and a woman’s body, dressed in old-fashioned clothes, was hanging from the rope, her waist at about the level of the open trap.

  They closed the door and ran haphazard along the cutting, as if what they had seen could physically harm them. Then, smoking cigarettes in trembling fingers within comforting sight of the lights of the village, they discussed what they had found. They came to the conclusion that they could only make trouble and embarrassment for themselves by telling anyone about it.

  ‘No, sir. I have been unable to trace him.’

  Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw was, neither by temperament nor discipline, an untruthful man, but some degree of disingenuousness seemed bound to creep in whenever he was compelled to discuss Mosley with the Assistant Chief Constable.

  ‘Well, at least that’s one hazard you’re free of,’ the Assistant Chief Constable said.

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that. Mosley is about. There are indelible signs that Mosley is about.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘An allotment dug here, a hen house whitewashed there. Mosley appears to be lugging his social conscience about the fells.’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘However – it isn’t Mosley that I’m concerned about.’ No mention of Beamish, not a reference to Barker’s Clough –‘What I am anxious about is the size of the army I am going to be able to muster to beat across the hills tomorrow at first light.’

  ‘You know very well the size of the army we can muster. What with Bradburn playing at home, minor royalty staying at Blendale Castle, and a Hell’s Angels’rally in Calesdale, I doubt whether I can rake up a dozen for you.’

  ‘You know, sir – this is hopeless.’

  But then an incoming phone call brought him inspiration. A party of children, out studying ‘The Sounds of the Countryside by Night’, had discovered a pair of woman’s knickers, clinging to a gorse bush on the moors a few hundred feet above Hempshaw End. They were apparently an outrageous outsize in woman’s knickers, were untrimmed – aggressively plain, in fact – and were made in some coarse and heavy longcloth of a sort that had gone out of fashionable wear early in the century.

  At least, Grimshaw knew now where he was going to recruit his army.

  Chapter Nine
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  From the diary of Elizabeth Stirrup for Saturday, 9 April

  Dear Diary – Yes, I am in in such a state that I can write such a thing as that. It is the middle of the night, and I cannot find sleep. Georgina defeats me. My God, how can I ever have imagined myself in love with her? Throughout the evening, her eyes kept wandering to the window: not as if she were afraid of someone lurking out there, but as if she were expecting, positively wanting a visitor.

  When we finally retired – I made a natural enough excuse to go up early – she seemed highly relieved. For some time after I had gone upstairs I could hear her moving about between the kitchen and the sitting-room. Then, straining my ears, I heard her quietly, secretively, open the back door. She let someone in – and I knew it was that man. But they kept their voices low. He has been in the house a couple of hours now, and I have not heard a word that has been said. But the horrible smell of his tobacco has filled the house and even crept under my bedroom door.

  It is not that I want to conjure up afresh the foolishly imagined relationships of childhood. What distresses me is that all Georgina’s sense of values seems to have been swept away by some hurricane. Where is the Miss Crane who taught me John Donne and Lear?

  Georgina Crane knew that Noll Cromwell had been hanging

  about outside for a long time, that he had been waiting for Elizabeth Stirrup to go to bed. Because – his coarseness apart – he was a man who would have no difficulty in weighing up Elizabeth. It was a pity about that child – unfair though it was, it was only as a child that Georgina Crane could think of her. Had she been in some form of spiritual hibernation since she had come out of the last of her examination-rooms? It made one think that it was too dangerous a responsibility by far, to risk trying to teach anybody anything. What had Elizabeth Stirrup ever learned, beyond the false values of A-Level Lit: a shopping-list of what to look for in a work of art, which the examiners could assess by a process of academic arithmetic.

  Georgina went to her back-door and let Noll Cromwell in. He had dressed for the occasion – it would be comic, if it were not so sincere a gesture on his part. He was not quite in the funeral garb that the Valley expected of him. He had on his narrow-brimmed bowler, a black suit with waistcoat and watch-chain – but not the pigeon-fancier’s medal that some said he had worn at his wedding; and of course he had no black ribbons fluttering from his hat-band. It was rather as if he had got himself up to call on an old-fashioned solicitor. The bottoms of his trousers fell over the eyelets of his boots so that it was impossible to tell whether he was wearing his knotted laces or not. It was unkind to look, because Noll Cromwell was suffering. Beneath the sometimes terrifying image of the tearaway, Georgina always thought of him as a saddened man who had never really orientated himself.

  ‘What can I offer you to drink? Coffee, cocoa – something more bodisome?’

  ‘If you told me you had whisky, I wouldn’t say no to it.’

  She had a drop of Scotch left in the cabinet.

  ‘I’m going to share this between the two of us. I have a feeling we’re going to get down to some basic truths tonight.’

  Cromwell looked too fatigued to rise to any verbal wit.

  ‘What can you tell me, Miss Crane?’

  ‘What can I tell you? Only what I found when I called to deliver Janie’s dinner. I have no information at all that won’t already have come your way.’

  ‘It’s that silly bugger Mosley who’s messed things up. I’m sorry, Miss Crane. I came here meaning to mind my manners, just for once.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Mr Cromwell. Only I never think that bad language does much to clarify things. In what sense do you think that Inspector Mosley has blundered?’

  ‘All that about mowing my lawn. What chance had he of making any sort of a job of it? He knew something was going on – and he was determined to keep me out of it. Yet I can’t think for a moment that he really knew what was going to happen. Whatever it was, it must have got out of hand.’

  ‘But what sort of thing can Mr Mosley possibly have known?’

  ‘I’ve been breaking my brains against that ever since the Superintendent came to see me. I can only think that Mosley knew that someone had come into the district whom it wouldn’t be healthy for certain people to see.’

  ‘I’ve come to more or less the same conclusion myself. So have you any idea who it might be?’

  ‘I haven’t an inkling, ma’am. Janie, you know, she’s been to places and done things in her time that you and I know nothing about.’

  ‘I’m sure she has. But if we’re right about this, whoever it was would obviously be no stranger to you. Otherwise why would Mr Mosley be going to such peculiar lengths to keep you out of trouble? If that’s what you really think he was doing –’

  ‘I’m sure it was.’

  ‘He wanted to keep me out of trouble. Maybe if I’d been there, there’d have been no trouble.’

  ‘Or maybe you’d have been under arrest by now for doing grievous bodily harm.’

  ‘Better that, than that Janie should have been hurt.’

  ‘So how many people out of your past and Janie’s would you have done grievous bodily harm to, Noll?’

  It was the first time in her life that Georgina had ever called him by his Christian name. She did not know why she had let it happen and for some seconds she was uneasy about the ill-wisdom of it. One never quite knew with these revolutionaries: they were so often deeply conventional at heart. But Noll Cromwell was so exclusively absorbed in his own thoughts that he seemed not to have noticed.

  ‘So somebody may have come to seek Janie out,’ Georgina said. ‘From which phase of her life would you expect that to be?’

  Significantly, Cromwell embarked on an oblique answer. ‘It’s hard to say. Her childhood, you know – I’m speaking now of all the Goodwin kids, except the boy – it was not at all what you might have expected it to be.’

  ‘No. I’ve always heard that.’

  ‘He was a right old bugger, you know, was old Wilson Goodwin. Well, he must have been, mustn’t he, to have had all those kids when, if the truth were told, they never could make ends meet? Well, for example, they weren’t regular church-goers and I’d put him down as just about the most unchristian man in Hempshaw at that time – but if he decided that one particular Sunday they were going to church, then it was like putting the family on parade. He’d line them up in the entrance hall, and inspect each one of them from top to toe before he led them down the steps. Then they used to have to follow him, a respectful half a yard behind him, all the way to the church. He’d play merry hell if one of them had scuffed the toe of his boot. They went in fear and trembling of him when he was in that mood.’

  Cromwell paused. This was not exactly what he had intended telling. But Georgina eased him along. She knew which way his mind was working.

  ‘Yes – I’ve heard that he was a capricious martinet.’

  In some ways, she probably knew more about the Goodwins than Cromwell did. They were talked about by other people, besides the villagers. Wilson Goodwin must have come into funds of some kind during his youth, which had enabled him to capitalize the things he thought he had lined up for himself and his family. Goodwin had suffered delusions of facile grandeur of a kind that was almost a cliché. As one of the most extensive landowners in the Hemp Valley, he expected facile success. Even an eventual title was not impossible if he did enough affluent entertaining of the right kind. There were some who said that what he longed for was a relatively impoverished Lord Lieutenant whom he could help out in his obligations. But the County, as everyone in the Valley could have predicted, never did let him in: presumably the unofficial standing committees did not take long over their enquiries. For the sake of showing what hospitality he could rise to, he had to fill the Hall over long weekends with townee freeloaders who cost him more than money: the very sight of them swanning about the countryside proved that the County had been right about him. And money was something whi
ch, over the first few years, he seemed remarkably capable of organizing on a strictly short-term basis; or, at least, he knew how to shift debts about. (One year, for example, he gained himself a wave of much-needed local popularity by putting the Hempshaw End cricket team on its feet, only to leave them to discover after the débâcle that they had the bills to settle for themselves.)

  He had made an attempt to get into politics, having found a distant constituency purblind enough to adopt him. (In the early stages, Goodwin always seemed able to convince strangers of his charm, even of his financial stability.) But once he was let loose in a by-election, he rapidly became the despair of his agent, pressing a policy that was his own natural philosophy, an ‘England for the English’ slogan, bluntly racist along a pattern that even lacked epigrams, and aggressively against any kind of namby-pamby collectivist social concern. His basic incapacity – in effect, it was pure lack of judgement – was a gift to an opponent who was not without intellect, and within ten days of campaigning he had become an embarrassment to many of his own party, losing a safe seat on the second recount. He was never invited to stand elsewhere. A similar sort of fate seemed to befall every attempt that he made to replenish his coffers by commercial ventures. Hempshaw End was not well informed about the details, but he was believed to have dabbled at one time in seaside holiday bungalows, and at another in an infallible syndicate for staking substantial cross-double racing bets. In such enterprises he showed a flair for publicity, but it was on a lavish scale that the projects proved unable to sustain. And it was the local domestic suppliers of the Hall who were the first to be disillusioned when he had to start shunting his limited assets about: Frank Turner, Jimmy Edmunds and Walter Slack.

  ‘But it was the brother,’ Noll Cromwell said. ‘It was only the brother that mattered to either of the parents. I don’t know what happened to young Wilson Goodwin. Janie never knew, either.’

  There were certain things that Wilson Goodwin had understood. One was how to control a sinking fund that was beyond the reach – indeed beyond the knowledge – of the receivers in bankruptcy. The other was the principle that estates, however unpromising, stand an obviously better chance of growth if they are kept intact.